But that wasn’t necessary. The tourist fell all over himself apologizing and begged to buy the drinks. Someone else bought them next, and someone after him. Nobody ventured near the booth, where the spacemen obviously wanted privacy. But from time to time, when Diaz glanced out, he got many smiles and a few shy waves. It was almost embarrassing.

“I was afraid for a minute we’d have a fight,” he said.

“N-no,” Bailey answered. “I’ve watched our prestige develop exponentially, being Stateside while my leg healed. I doubt if there’s an American alive who’d lift a finger against a Corpsman these days. But I admit I was afraid of a scene. That wouldn’t’ve done the name of the Corps any good. As things worked out, though…”

“We came off too bloody well,” Diaz finished. “Now there’s not even any pseudolife in this place. Let’s haul mass. We can catch the transpolar shuttle to Paris if we hurry.”

But at that moment the proprietor’s friends and relations, who also remembered him, began to arrive. They must have been phoned the great news. Pablo was there, Manuel, Carmen with her castanets, Juan with his guitar, Tio Rico waving a bottle in each enormous fist; and they welcomed Diaz back with embraces, and soon there was song and dancing, and the fiesta ended in the rear courtyard watching the moon set before dawn, and everything was like the old days, for Señor Capitán Diaz’s sake. That had been a hell of a good furlough.

* * *

Another jet splashed fire across the Milky Way. Closer this time, and obviously reducing relative speed. Diaz croaked out a cheer. He had spent weary hours waiting. The hugeness and aloneness had eaten farther into his defenses than he wished to realize. He had begun to understand why some people were disturbed to see the stars on a clear mountain night. (Where wind went soughing through Jeffrey pines whose bark smelled like vanilla if you laid your head close, and a river flowed cold and loud over stones—oh, Christ, how beautiful Earth was!) He shoved such matters aside and reactivated his transmitter.

The streak winked out and the stars crowded back into his eyes. But that was all right, it meant the boat had decelerated as much as necessary, and soon a scooter would be homing on his beam, and water and food and sleep, and a new ship and eventually certain letters to write. That would be the worst part—but not for months or years yet, not till one side or the other conceded the present phase of the war. Diaz found himself wishing most for a cigarette.

He hadn’t seen the boat’s hull this time, of course; no rosy cloud had existed to silhouette its blackness. Nor did he see the scooter until it was almost upon him. That jet was very thin, since it need only drive a few hundred pounds of mass on which two spacesuited men sat. They were little more than a highlight and a shadow. Diaz’s pulse filled the silence. “Hallo!” he called in his helmet mike. “Hallo, yonder!”